Page 105 of Tracked and Taken

The frame warps more. A seam in the transparent wall beside the door cracks.

Tael’s voice, wrecked, through the speaker —

“Natalie. Natalie. Hold.”

I hold.

I hold with the scalpel up and my back to the door Tael is trying to come through and Kesh one and a half meters from me with his canines down and the pheromone saturation climbing through my body and the knowing of what is happening and the not being able to stop my skin from saying yes to what my mouth is saying no to.

Kesh takes another step.

One meter.

His canines. His eyes — flat silver, dying, the same biology in the wrong male — are on my throat. The exact spot where Tael did not mark me last night. The spot I held my thumb to his throat and waited.

The spot Kesh is about to take.

The console chimes a third time.

“Chamber at seventy-five percent saturation.”

Another slam at the door. Louder. Closer to through than any slam yet. The transparent wall cracks up the seam. The frame gives another inch.

Tael is one slam away.

Kesh is half a meter away.

My body is on fire.

I bring the scalpel up to the mate-mark spot on my throat.

I will cut my throat before I let him mark it.

Not because I would rather die than wear a mark. Because the spot is Tael’s. I held my thumb to the matching spot on his throat last night and chose to wait, and no one gets to take the choosing. Not Kesh. Not the compound. Not the room somebody invoiced for.

Kesh does not stop.

The compound overrides him. The same way it is overriding me. The dying silver-eyed male in front of my throat is, by the chemical reading his body is carrying out of his control, no longer running on Kesh Vorrin’s discipline.

His hand comes up.

Not to the sidearm. Not to the blade. To the back of my neck. The cradle a Draelith male’s hand makes at the back of his pair-identified female’s neck when he is about to set the mark.

The hand is warm.

My body responds to the warmth.

I hate the warmth.

I hate it in the register of a woman who has had a hand in the exact same place on her body and who is now feeling the same chemistry from the wrong male.

My scalpel is at my own throat.

My hand, with the scalpel, is shaking.

I am going to have to cut.

I am going to have to cut myself to keep him from marking me.